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Stop striving & start achieving, NOW! I work with a lot of business people who are striving for something. A job promotion, more sales, more customers, more confidence, more time, a better career, better relationships at work, more profit, more fun….the list goes on. We all seem to want more…and yet many of us are working harder to stay still. What’s going on? As a word, striving doesn’t have a real ‘ring of success’ to it, does it? Why do we ‘strive’ when instead we could ‘achieve’? And how can we change our own behaviours to emulate that of life’s great achievers?So here are my top 5 tips for achieving what you want, NOW!: 1. Clarify exactly what it is that you want. Describe it to yourself and others in exact terms. You might have to quantify it in terms of its size, volume, quality, quantity, location, timescale etc etc. Woolly won’t do! Your brain needs absolute clarity at this point. 2. Work with your goal in several formats. Try mind-mapping it to expand it on paper…then try refining it to one sentence to condense it. Get some magazines and pictures and create a visual collage of it, then create a written list of the key features of the goal. Describe your goal to someone else – find the words to define it. Using these different formats will stimulate different parts of your brain, all the while increasing your chances of achieving the goal. 3. Define the date by which the goal needs to be achieved. Put it in the diary and now work backwards to count how many weeks or months you have between then and now. Check – is the timescale realistic – have you accounted for hiccups and unforeseen time ‘thieves’? 4. Now work out key milestones on your journey between now and the goal achievement date. What needs to be achieved by when? Diarize these activities and actions. Do it now – don’t wait! 5. Share your progress and achievement with a trusted colleague to whom you can be accountable. Let them give you a little prod from time to time and encourage them to tell you if you are finding excuses for your lack of progress. Encourage them to let you do the same for them – you will thank each other in the long run! Lots of small achievements amount to bucket loads of success. So swap your ‘striving’ for ‘achieving’, and see the difference it makes.